On Thursday, July 20, 2023 10:57:22 PM MDT Chris Piker via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote: > (Warning, possible ill-informed opinions ahead...) > > In a way there is a need to reinvent the wheel. With python I > can run `pip install matplotlib` and get whatever binaries I need > to get the job done. D runs on dub, which I only see handling > source code, and as far as I can tell, only D source code at > that. So unless it's D code, it can't be packaged and delivered > easily within the D ecosystem. > > If dub supports either pre-built binaries, or C code (such as > libcairo2), I'd be interested in seeing how that's done. With > the wizardry I've see around here, it's probably easy, I just > don't know about it.
Well, dub is certainly designed around building projects that are pure D without anything fancy going on, but with effort, it's possible to do far more complicated stuff (though it's certainly far more of a pain than would be desirable). That being said, if the C libraries are already on your system, it's trivial to have a dub project just use them via bindings in the D code. And there are libraries on code.dlang.org which are basically just bindings for C libraries. Regardless though, dub really isn't designed with packaging anything in mind. Rather, it's designed to build your code as well as pull in D libraries that it usees and build those too. Anyone looking to actually package stuff would create a package from what was built with dub (e.g. with deb, rpm, flatpacks, etc.). > Going waaaay out on a limb for a minute, I think D shines as a > scripting language replacement. Most of my programs are single > file projects these days with dub set as the interpreter. Also > Rust seems to be crowding the system level space and so focusing > on it's "compiled scripts" capability avoids that competition. > > (If any of the statements above are faulty, I invite correction.) D does work quite well as a scripting language replacement for a lot stuff. In fact, the compiler and standard library have largely replaced their Makefiles with D scripts. It's definitely worse if you want to write a script that needs to pull in dependencies that aren't part of the standard library, but if Phobos has what you need, it works quite well - and of course, you can always run other shell commands from within a D program. - Jonathan M Davis
